Are you ready to give up the fantasy of being rich?

+ an interview with Michelle Teheux

Hi and welcome to The Ladybird Purse, my weekly newsletter about women and money. I’m not a financial advisor and not qualified to give financial advice.

Last week, I went to London for two days for my 15yo’s birthday. A couple of months ago, when he said that’s what he wanted to do, I started putting away a tenner a week towards it. I set it up to transfer automatically and I genuinely didn’t notice the money leaving my account. I was pretty pleased with myself when I was able to transfer it back on the way down on the train. Going to try to make sure I do that more in future.

I’ve written before about struggling to spend money even on the thing I saved it for. I also wrote about the £15 chocolate mousse the 15yo and I shared in London last summer and, in the same post, about how I hate to be ripped off.

I didn’t have a problem spending the money this time. And even though everything was of course expensive, the only thing I resented was being overcharged for water. A small bottle in the hotel that cost £4. Ridiculous. And then, in a restaurant, the server asked if we wanted water before we’d even sat down. I wanted to say “Tap water’s fine, thanks” but I didn’t. I told myself they’d probably just bring tap water anyway, but really it was because I didn’t want to seem stingy. Again, ridiculous. And again it was £4. For a much bigger bottle, but still.

Over the two days, we spent some time in fancy areas (one I could never imagine myself living in and another I totally could) and I got the feeling I often get in London. I don’t quite know how to describe it. It’s a sort of yearning, but a very specific type of yearning: it’s a yearning to be rich. I’m not sure it even is yearning, it’s more an almost unconscious/subconscious one day… just wait… which I know is not an emotion, but I don’t know how else to describe it.

I’m going to talk a little bit here about the parallels between money and weight, so if that’s something you’d like to avoid, skip ahead to the interview with Michelle Teheux, who I’ve wanted to talk to since reading her post What Would You Do With One Week of Wealth? about going viral on Medium and making over $20,000.

What Would You Do with One Week of Wealth?

It’s the same feeling I used to get when I watched Friends and would dream about losing weight… someday. Not a plan, not an intention, just a sort of vague, not necessarily even conscious, one day I’ll be different sensation.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the parallels between diet culture and what Dana Miranda who writes Healthy Rich (and who I interviewed here) calls “budget culture”. Restriction and control. Binge eating and splurge spending. I mentioned it to a friend and she pointed out that in diet clubs people talk about how many calories they have left to ‘spend’. Plus both have the whole ‘I deserve a little treat’ thing. Also - and I can’t believe it took me so long to notice this - often when we talk about cutting back on spending, we call it tightening our belts.

(When I was a freelance journalist, I pitched “Do you have a spending disorder?” about exactly this, but no one ever picked it up. I just checked my email and it was sixteen years ago, good grief.)

I just finished reading Dana’s book You Don’t Need a Budget. I loved it and I’m sure I’ll have lots more to say about it in coming weeks, but one line that jumped out and punched me in the face was that we have to “let go of the fantasy of being rich.”

I let go of the fantasy of being thin a few years ago now. Mostly. Maybe ninety percent. I can absolutely watch Friends without that one day feeling. But I don’t think I’m ready to let go of the fantasy of being rich.

I don’t mean the kind of rich that’s ruining the world. I just want plenty. Plenty of money for me and my family and also to help other people. But when I’m in London, it doesn’t feel like that. When I’m in London, I feel like I want to be stupid rich. And I think that’s because I moved there at 18 with this whole idea for what my life was going to be. I think maybe that’s what I need to let go of.

This morning, I started reading Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis by Ada Calhoun and she writes this about how we find a way out of midlife dissatisfaction is “facing up to our lives as they really are, letting go of the expectations we had for ourselves growing up…”

But a part of me feels like if I do that I’ll be letting 18yo me down. And I really don’t want to do that. Look at her little face! Look at her massive hair! Look at how she’s wearing a watch over a sweatband!

But I will work on it.

How about you? Are you ready to let go of the fantasy of being rich? Or have you done so already? Or maybe you never had that fantasy to begin with, what’s that like??

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An interview with Michelle Teheux

Michelle is a writer in central Illinois. Find her on Medium or Substack.

Michelle’s most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules.

What inspired you to start writing Untrickled?

I was looking for a niche. In all the years I worked in newspapers and had a syndicated newspaper column, I could never get myself to focus on one thing because I’m truly interested in everything (well, not cars or sports. But everything else!). My writing is all over the place on Medium, too. Relationships one day, politics the next, my dogs occasionally – I just can’t pin myself down. So I decided that on Substack, I’d pick one topic and stick to it.

Of course, what I found is that income inequality actually has a lot to do with almost everything, because how much money we have shapes our lives in every way you can imagine. One day I write about private equity and another day I share a low-cost recipe or something about how money affects relationships. So I’m still writing about all the things … but I always have at least one finger pointed to income inequality as I do it.

What is your relationship with money currently?

I don’t like or trust money. It’s seldom been there for me when I’ve needed it! It’s like a bad, bad boyfriend. I’ve spent most of my life scheming to figure out ways to live a good life without having much money. Sometimes this works out and sometimes it does not.

What’s your earliest money memory?

I can remember having $8 as a young child and counting it often, unable to believe my good fortune in having amassed such a sum.

What advice would you give your younger self about money?

I spent so much time and effort trying to live on as little as possible. I now wonder if there might have been any way to shift some of that energy into earning more instead of spending less. However, even now, I am not sure how I could have made that happen.

What’s the biggest money mistake you’ve made?

I likely should have delayed having children a little bit longer so I could have saved up an emergency fund. But I had baby fever. I got married in 1987, graduated from college in 1988, gave birth to my daughter in 1989 and gave birth to my son in 1992. I conceived each kid the very first month I tried.

But you know, the first newspaper job I got only paid $215 per week to start, so it’s not like I could have saved a meaningful amount even if I had waited a bit.

The most amusing stupid money thing I ever did was buy a houseboat I could in no way afford. It was ancient and cheap – about $4K, I think – but it was a money pit! I’d just gotten divorced and was dating a much younger, very good-looking and charming dufus. He said he’d make the payments if I took out the loan because I had good credit and he had lousy credit. For a while it was tons of fun – I live near the Illinois River. And then we broke up. I was, fortunately, able to sell it for what I put into it and a bit more. Thank God! I always say newly divorced people will always do at least one really dumb thing. That was mine.

What’s the best thing you’ve ever spent money on?

Thank goodness my first husband and I bought a house in 1990. It was the cutest little bungalow and we got it for $37,500 using FHA to qualify for a low down payment. Our interest rate was 9.5 percent and that was thought to be just fine! Our payments were about $400 per month with insurance and taxes included, and we really struggled to pay them the first few years, until my former husband’s pay had risen a bit (he was a teacher) and I’d returned to work.

We sold it for $47,500, and I’d been paying triple or quadruple payments for a couple of years, so that money allowed us to buy your standard suburban 1970s quad-level house in a much, much better neighborhood with a good down payment.

I had to sell that house after my divorce and scale down, but still, the equity from that early house purchase made a lot of difference. Please, young people, do not listen to Dave Ramsey and his bullshit advice about waiting until you’re free of debt, have an emergency fund and a big down payment to buy a house. If I had listened to him, I’d still be living in an apartment. I’d likely be paying twice as much to rent a two-bedroom place as I am now paying for a giant old house I nearly own outright. That first house payment was about the same as the rent we were paying, so waiting would have made no sense.

Do you have a retirement fund? If not, do you have a plan?

I have a paltry one from when I had actual jobs, but I never made enough to fund it as one is supposed to. I couldn’t put in anything at all for many years, so my plan is to keep working forever. Writing is something I can do for as long as my mind holds out – but I did not anticipate AI. So we will see.

I did save a big chunk from that viral article on sex education I am always talking about! It has made me just shy of $23K now. (Yes, a story I spent a couple of hours writing has earned more than any book I’ve written.) I was glad to be able to save some money from that.

What would you do with $10,000?

My car is 20 years old, so maybe I’d use it to buy something a bit newer. But I might also put up solar panels.

What little luxury could you get with a tenner?

I’d wait for the next warm, sunny day, go to a restaurant with sidewalk seating, order a complicated foo-foo drink and people-watch. I used to be strictly a whisky chick, but I decided life’s too short not to indulge in the occasional silly drink.

If you were me, what would you want to ask women about money?

I am always fascinated by how differently people live, especially when you know what they make. Sometimes you are in a workplace where you know you’re all making the same salary, yet some are living life large and some are church mice.

And it’s natural to wonder how that can be. You never know if someone has access to some family money, is living frugally so they can stick everything possible into savings or is secretly broke and is financing an impressive-looking life on credit.

Sometimes a partner is carrying most of the household expenses. If your family of origin paid for your college and gave you the down payment to buy a house, that can make a helluva difference in how you live, and that difference is likely to persist throughout your financial life.

So I guess the question I often really want to know but of course cannot ask is, “Do you support your lifestyle with your own earnings?” That’s not a question most people would be very comfortable answering, I suspect. It’s quite nosy!

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THIS WEEK ON MY OTHER SUBSTACK, HAPPY ENDINGS…

My mum’s 1962 diary and some photos that show why my dad’s nickname for her was ‘Glam’

"Harry and I were feeling rather the worse for wear so we stayed in."